Individual Differences in Multisensory Illusory Perception
Faculty Mentor: Carmel Levitan, Cognitive Science Department
Major: Cognitive Science
Funding: Undergraduate Research Center Summer Research Fellowship
Abstract:
We present behavioral and electrophysiological data (N=43) examining individual differences in perception of two auditory-visual illusions: the double flash illusion (DFI) in which sound alters visual perception and the McGurk illusion in which visual information alters auditory perception. We investigated the average prevalence of multisensory illusions, consistency across time, how illusory experiences relate to each other, and how behavioral responses relate to neural signals both during trials and immediately before trial onset. For both illusions, individual susceptibility was highly variable with some participants almost always (or almost never) experiencing both illusions and most in the middle. Interestingly, perception of one illusion was unrelated to the other, suggesting susceptibility to multisensory illusions stems not from a global property such as the size of the temporal binding window. There was also high consistency in susceptibility across sessions occurring on different days suggesting there may be stable person-related factors contributing to individual’s illusory perceptions.
Watch my research presentation below.
Questions or comments? Contact me at: jfloyd@oxy.edu